Colin Flint

Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Geographic Research Questions and Agendas

Abstract The analysis of contemporary terrorism and related policy prescriptions both suffer from a lack of geographical understanding. This short article engages terrorist studies by outlining: (1) the importance of geohistorical context in understanding the causes of contemporary terrorism, especially the role of the United States as hegemonic power; (2) the spatiality of terrorist networks; and (3) the potentially negative efficacy of existing counterterrorist policies given the interaction of terrorist networks and state sovereignty. Finally, a call is made for comparative studies of terrorism and greater interaction between political geography and peace and conflict studies. *Thanks to Lorraine Dowler and Ian Oas for their comments and conversations, as well as Susan Cutter, Doug Richardson, Tom Wilbanks, and the rest of the participants in the AAG/NSF workshop “The Geographical Dimensions of Terrorism.” Thank you, too, to the reviewers. Of course, the burden of responsibility for errors and omissions is my own.

Conceptualizing ConflictSpace: Toward a Geography of Relational Power and Embeddedness in the Analysis of Interstate Conflict

The concept of ConflictSpace facilitates the systematic analysis of interstate conflict data. Building on relational theories of power, we identify the spatiality of conflict as a combination of territorial and network embeddedness. The former is modeled through spatial analysis and the latter by social network analysis. A brief empirical example of the spread of World War I illustrates how the position of states within physical and network spaces explains their roles within a broader geography of territorial settings and network relations.

Just War and Extraterritoriality: The Popular Geopolitics of the United States' War on Iraq as Reflected in Newspapers of the Arab World

Abstract As with all wars, the U.S. military invasion of Iraq in 2003 needed to be portrayed as a just war in an attempt to garner support and legitimacy, domestically and internationally. The United States was acting as hegemonic power in the international state-system and, in light of this role, had imperatives and tools in creating the argument for a just war that differed from those used by nonhegemonic states. The United States acted extraterritorially by diffusing a message of moral right. Arab resistance to the war was evident in the construction of the United States and its leadership as immoral, precluding its ability to wage a just war. This article focuses on the Arab response by analyzing the portrayal in Arab newspapers of the imminent war on Iraq. Sixty-five newspapers of the Arabic language (plus the Iraqi news agency), published in seventeen Arab countries, of which four were Iraqi newspapers, were consulted for the purpose of this study. Interpretation of the geopolitical rhetoric within newspaper reports and political cartoons published in Arab newspapers highlights the way that arguments of morality and immorality were connected to understandings of territorial sovereignty and hegemonic extraterritorial influence into territorial sovereign spaces.

How the United States justified its war on terrorism: prime morality and the construction of a ‘just war’

Just war theory has a long established reputation in the social sciences for evaluating the morality of the military actions of states. However, this analysis has rested upon assumptions of territorial sovereignty and the equal rights of states. The actions of hegemonic powers violate these twin assumptions through their expression of extra‐territorial reach. To avoid charges of immoral behaviour hegemonic powers must use the just war rhetoric of territoriality to justify their extra‐territorial acts. A world‐systems theory conceptualisation of hegemony allows for an interpretation of hegemonic military actions as the defence of a universal prime modernity. Prime modernity refers to an ideal organization of society projected by the hegemonic power as a form of integrative power. For the hegemonic power, threat is perceived as a rejection of the prime modernity anywhere rather than the language of border violations that dominates the foundations of just war theory. Using the language embedded in government and non‐government documents justifying the War on Terrorism, the manner in which a hegemonic power constructed military extra‐territoriality in a system of sovereign states as just is examined. The development of a ‘prime morality’ allowed the hegemonic power to claim that it was operating at the scales of the individual and ‘humankind’ rather than inter‐state power politics. The analysis challenges the implicit geographic assumptions of just war theory and extends our understanding of the imperatives underlying the hegemonic powers construction of its military actions as morally right.

Forming Electorates, Forging Spaces: The Nazi Party Vote and the Social Construction of Space

Using a social constructivist view of space, the agency of both the Nazi Party and the electorate created spatial contexts that, in turn, mediated future political activity. Spatial statistical analysis of aggregate voting data models the diffusion of Nazi Party electoral support across space as well as the construction of regionally specific electorates. The statistical concept of spatial dependence captures the creation of new spaces of power by the Nazi Party. The concept of spatial heterogeneity captures how the Nazi Partys electorate was composed of different socioeconomic groups in different regional settings. The growth of the Nazi party vote in Baden between May 1924 and July 1932 is used to exemplify the social theoretical view of space and the application of spatial statistics.

Mapping the Dynamism of the United States' Geopolitical Code: The Geography of the State of the Union Speeches, 1988–2008

The changing geographical foci of the geopolitical code of the United States are examined by a content analysis of the presidential State of the Union Speeches between 1988 and 2008, the last year of President Reagans term through the presidency of George W. Bush. The State of the Union speeches are interpreted as geopolitical discourse within a structural setting, using seven foreign-policy paradigms as an organising framework. The empirical findings illustrate an increase over time in the number of regions and countries mentioned in the speeches. Also, notable differences between administrations in terms of their advocacy of globalist or regionalist policies and emphasis upon allies or adversaries are found.

A TimeSpace for electoral geography: economic restructuring, political agency and the rise of the Nazi party

Abstract Using the electoral rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany as an example, this paper proposes the use of cyclico-ideological TimeSpace from Immanuel Wallerstein for the analysis of electoral geography. Elections are viewed as acts of political agency within structural constraints. From a world-systems perspective, the temporal dynamics and spatial structure of the capitalist world-economy are used to identify Weimar Germany as a semi-peripheral country during a period of global economic stagnation and restructuring, a Kondratieff B-phase. The structure and dynamics of the world-economy are expected to mobilize three classes in the semi-periphery; the “national” bourgeoisie, professionals, and skilled workers. Conflicts between factions of capital in Weimar Germany, defined by the economic restructuring, created a period of political instability exploited by the Nazi party. Furthermore, the Nazi party pursued policies to capture the votes of the three classes mobilized in the semi-periphery. However, electoral politics was mediated by regional contextual settings so that different classes supported the Nazi party in different regions of Germany. The regional specificity of the Nazi partys ability to capture the votes of people disaffected by the dynamics of the world-economy is modeled using spatial regression models. Consideration of a cyclico-ideological TimeSpace allows electoral geography to analyze how voters in contextual settings react to global processes.

Right-wing resistance to the process of American hegemony: the changing political geography of nativism in Pennsylvania, 1920–1998

Abstract The process of hegemony requires the construction of a new and dynamic prime modernity in the capitalist world-economy. Such a process produces new social relations and, therefore, dislocations that invoke political reaction within the hegemonic power. In the case of American hegemony a new urban-based modernity marginalized rural areas and led to the establishment of suburbia as the centerpiece of American modernity. Two periods of nativism illustrate the social dislocations at the beginning and end of American hegemony, Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s and hate crimes in the 1990s. Using data for the state of Pennsylvania, the geography of 1920s Klan activity is contrasted with the geography of reported hate crimes in the 1990s. The two spatial patterns illustrate that nativism was a rural phenomena in the 1920s and a suburban phenomena in the 1990s. Nativism at the beginning of American hegemony was a reaction to the new modernity being defined in urban centers. As American hegemony experienced a decline, nativist reaction was found in the social setting that epitomized American consumer modernity, suburbia.

The Multi-Disciplinary Reclamation of Geopolitics: New Opportunities and Challenges

The story of geopolitics may be described by the words of the Grateful Dead: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” From being the driving force behind the establishment of geography as a modern university discipline through a false, but near fatal, association with Nazism, the common story is that it took Henry Kissinger, a refugee from Nazism, to resurrect the topic. Such a revival was partial. The geopolitics that Kissinger promoted was the practical and realist geopolitics of states versus states. It took a reaction against such practices, under the guise of critical geopolitics, to rehabilitate geopolitics as an academic enterprise. In tandem with the post-structural approach of critical geopolitics, structural approaches to geopolitics, such as world-systems theory, provided a means to bring the “global” back in to the conversation without resorting to faux-histories and national agendas. The energy provided by feminist geopolitics kept the revival going, and now geopolitics is an eclectic blend of theoretical perspectives and topical foci. This journal has enabled and reflected these changes. After establishing itself through a focus on the politics of boundaries it has become an outlet for research on the spatiality of all forms of geopolitics. We are very grateful for all previous editors, Richard Schofield (1995–1999), David Newman (1998–2014), John Agnew (1999–2008), and Simon Dalby (2009–2014), for providing such a strong foundation for us to build upon. With the revived academic geopolitics being born in opposition to geopolitics as statecraft we wish we could say “geopolitics is dead, long live geopolitics.” But world news is replete with issues, conflicts, and policies that hark back to the great power tensions and imperial aspirations of both the period of classical or imperial geopolitics at the turn of the nineteenth century and the Cold War period. Hence, we see a renewed effort by those close to the ears of many a Prince to claim geopolitical “truths,” based on gross simplifications of the world’s complexities, in order to push particular national security agendas. This type of geopolitics is not “dead”, or even zombified, but alive and well, and very influential.

Exiles and Arms: The Territorial Practices of State Making and War Diffusion in Post–Cold War Africa

Abstract The end of the Cold War resulted in a wave of political change among post-colonial states in Africa. Following these political transformations was nearly two decades of war in central Africa (the so-called Africas World War). Building on a notion of effective sovereignty regimes, or the relationships between central state authority and state territoriality, this paper examines the territorial strategies and practices associated with the transitions to multiparty politics that enabled the space/time spread of war in the region. The attempts of existing regimes to create polities capable of returning them to power through elections gave rise to territorial practices focused on supporting exile and refugee groups that actively undermined the sovereignty of neighboring states. These territorial practices, with their roots in the democratization of single-party states, directly contributed to nearly two decades of war and human suffering in the region, while ending the wars required altogether new territorial forms of cooperation between states. This example illustrates the diverse territorial practices of states and extends the idea of sovereignty regimes by showing the implications involved in the attempts to change the forms of effective sovereignty in certain geopolitical contexts.